It doesn’t take much to stir up anti-Americanism here in Europe. I am not thinking of the bombs that landed a hundred yards from President Bush as he wowed the people of Georgia on his visit last week. The only surprise is that they failed to explode – and, given the incompetence of former Soviet secret service men, even that isn’t really a surprise. Since it was pretty obvious that Mr. Bush’s presence was very much appreciated by the vast majority of Georgians (and Balts a few days earlier), this hostile gesture doesn’t count for much.

On the periphery of Europe – Ireland, Portugal, Poland, the Balkans, the Baltic and Black Sea states – America is still very popular. In France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, there is still sullen resentment. And in Britain – well, we idolize American culture, but we reserve the right to shatter the idols at any moment.

A tycoon from Florida has just bought the most famous English soccer club, Manchester United, for nearly $1.5 billion. Malcolm Glazer, who has already taken the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to victory in the Super Bowl from the bottom of the National Football League, says there is room to expand the Manchester United “franchise.”

A visiting American friend asked me last week in genuine bewilderment why there was such an uproar in the British press. When I explained that half the schoolboys in England consider themselves “Man U” fans, he began to get it: “Oh, so it’s like a European zillionaire buying the New York Yankees?” he said. Well, yes, up to a point: Manchester United is the stuff of sports legend, ever since the entire team was wiped out in a plane crash half a century ago.

But even the iconic status of the team and its stadium, Old Trafford, does not explain the fury of the fans. It isn’t just the idea of a foreigner buying a club that has never been owned by one man before.

If that were the problem, then there would have been much more of an outcry when, a few years ago, the almost equally renowned Chelsea Football Club was bought by a Russian oil magnate, Roman Abramovich. This young man (still only 38) came from Arctic obscurity to make friends with Boris Yeltsin and profit from the privatization of the Siberian oil company Sibneft to become one of the 50 richest men on the planet. Unlike his former patron, Boris Berezovsky, Mr. Abramovich did not fall victim to President Putin’s crackdown on the “oligarchs,” though he was the first to move his holding company and much of his capital out of Russia. Despite the fact that his Jewish background and glitzy lifestyle fit the “cosmopolitan” stereotype so beloved of anti-Semitic Russian nationalists, Mr. Abramovich has been left alone by Mr. Putin – so far.

However controversial the sources of Mr. Abramovich’s wealth, he has certainly bankrolled Chelsea to the point at which they have just won the Premier League: a rude shock for Manchester United, which had got used to outbidding all rivals for the players it wanted and taken for granted its status as the leading English club.

No, the problem about Mr. Glazer buying Manchester United is not that he is a plutocrat, but that he is an American plutocrat.

Never mind the fact that Mr. Glazer made his fortune in a country so strictly regulated and so notoriously litigious that even corporate raiders have to play by the rules, whereas Mr. Abramovich made his pile in post-Soviet Russia – a kleptocracy that made the Chicago of Al Capone look like the Shakers of Sabbath Day Lake. The origins of Mr. Glazer’s wealth – among them junk bonds and trailer parks – may locate him near the rough end of the capitalist spectrum, but they do not warrant the vituperative snobbery of sections of the British press. Compared to the fat cats of the steppes, Mr. Glazer is a model of rectitude.

The point is that American capitalists are judged everywhere, even here in the business capital of Europe, by uniquely strict criteria. In a classical idiom, the contrast is between Croesus and Maecenas: Glazer the American is despised because he is rich as Croesus, the Lydian monarch who got his just deserts when he was conquered by the Persians, whereas Abramovich the Russian is admired as a Maecenas, the wealthy Roman patron of Virgil and Horace.

National stereotypes are usually at least a century out of date. “Buccaneer capitalism,” “robber barons,” and the “Wild West” are cliches from the great expansion of the American economy in the late 19th century. Ironically, Russia had its “Wild East” during the same period. Before war and revolution first crippled and then exterminated capitalism, Tsarist Russia had enjoyed a quarter century of rapid growth, faster than Western Europe and comparable to America. That era vanished into the black hole of communist propaganda. But the success of American capitalism has kept the memory of its most dynamic phase alive. Robber barons are today far more characteristic of the chaos of post-communist Russia than they are of overregulated corporate America. We British, however, will persist in seeing American tycoons as ogres and Russian oligarchs as knights in shining armor.